Wednesday lunchtime

I am far too easily distracted. Yesterday a friend who manages to keep up to date much more quickly than I do kindly alerted me (thanks, Ruth!) to a very recent example of a misreporting of the Cadbury Committee origins, in the recent report of the High Pay Commission. The report attributed the origins of both Cadbury and Greenbury government action. Irritated, I shot off this letter to the editor of the FT and to the chair of the HPC, Deborah Hargreaves.

The High Pay Commission report inaccurately describes the origins of both the Committee on the Financial Aspects of Corporate Governance, chaired by Sir Adrian Cadbury (not Lord Cadbury, as the HPC report describes him) and of the Study Group on Directors' Remuneration,  chaired by Sir Richard Greenbury . Neither initiative was prompted by government action. The first was sponsored by  the Financial Reporting Council, the London Stock Exchange and the Bank of England. The second was set up by the CBI.

In interpreting the reports produced by interest groups, it is important to be aware of their origins. The FT editorial on 21 November ("Managing high pay in companies") notes that the HPC has the support of the Joseph Rowntree Trust but omits the equally important fact that it was established by the pressure group Compass.

I doubt whether I shall receive any acknowledgement but it made me feel better and will get a footnote in the book. I also copied it to Adrian who replied in his usual courteous fashion and pointed out that another frequent erroneous statement is that the committee was set up in response to the Maxwell case.

I then spent some time looking at my NED paper to see how I need to update it from last year - I've discovered some useful literature since then. I wanted to write a new paper looking at the limitations of mandating board composition, incorporating some of the diversity literature, but I won't have time to do that before mid January when the abstract for the conference in Verona in April has to be submitted so I shall recycle the NED one. I might get the new one done in time for the EIASM workshop in May - I expect I could get away with a very rough draft for that, since I am co-chairing!

Most of this morning has been taken up with trying to sort out the story behind the way the case of the student with a dissertation resit has been handled. Our job vacancy has finally appeared on the university website so I alerted a potential external candidate. It seems that her university is being significantly affected by demonstrations associated with today's public sector strike action. Unsurprisingly, our bins haven't been emptied.

Now to make a start on chapter 7...